Sandia National Labs Academic Alliance Collaboration Report 2020-2021

AT THE SPEED OF LIGHT…SANDIA AND PURDUE’S ENERGETICS RESEARCH CENTER ADDRESSES THREATS

Over the last seven years, Sandia focused effort on a handful of bold, ambitious, and large projects with the potential for enormous impact to the security of the nation. These projects, or Grand Challenges (GC), span three years and advance the frontiers of science and engineering. One new GC LDRD project is Light Speed: Accelerating Fundamental Predictions of Explosive Optical Emissions. This challenge is tied to the acceleration and addition of critical physics to explosive fireball simulations while quantifying uncertainty, or remote sensing of explosive fireballs on the horizon.

Pictured: One of a series of tests studying fragmenting explosives in ways that haven’t been

possible in the past. The project observes explosively driven

fragments with flash X-ray and high-speed cameras.

64

Sandia Academic Alliance Program